About the University
Other poets with connections to Oxford
clockwise from top left: Oscar Wilde (Magdalen), Dorothy L Sayers, who was a poet as well as a novelist (Somerville), John Betjeman (Magdalen) and Edward Kamau Brathwaite: Caribbean Rhodes Scholar.
See more poets connected to Oxford
Past Professors of Poetry
| 18th Century | Date of Professorship |
| Joseph Trapp (1679–1747) Thomas Warton (1688[?]–1745) Joseph Spence (1699–1768) John Whitfield ([?]) Robert Lowth (1710–87) William Hawkins (1722–1801) Thomas Warton (1728–90) B. Wheeler ([?]) John Randolph (1749–1813) Robert Holmes (1748–1805) James Hurdis (1763–1801) |
1708–18 |
| 19th Century | |
| Edward Copleston (1776–1849) John Josias Conybeare (1779–1824) Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868) John Keble (1792–1866) James Garbett (1802–79) Thomas Legh Claughton (1808–92) Matthew Arnold (1822–88) Sir Francis Hastings Charles Doyle (1810–88) J.C. Shairp (1819–85) Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–97) William John Courthorpe (1842–1917) |
1802–12 1812–21 1821–31 1831–42 1842–52 1852–7 1857–67 1867–77 1877–85 1885–95 1895–1900 |
| 20th Century | |
| A.C. Bradley (1851–1935) J.W. Mackail (1859–1945) Sir Thomas Herbert Warren (1853–1930) [Vacancy] W.P. Ker (1855–1923) H.W. Garrod (1878–1960) E. de Selincourt (1870–1943) George Gordon (1881–1942) Adam Fox (1883–1977) [Vacancy] Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) Cecil Day–Lewis (1904–72) W.H. Auden (1907–73) R.R. Graves (1895–1985) E.C. Blunden (1896–1974) Roy B. Fuller (1912–91) John Barrington Wain (1925–94) Henry John Franklin Jones (1924– ) Peter Chad Tigar Levi (1931–2000) Seamus Justin Heaney (1939– ) James Martin Fenton (1949– ) Paul Muldoon (1951– ) |
1901–6 1906–11 1911–16 [Vacancy 1917–19] 1920–3 1923–8 1928–33 1933–8 1938–43 [Vacancy 1944–5] 1946–51 1951–5 1956–61 1961–6 1966–8 1968–73 1973–8 1979–84 1984–9 1989–94 1994–9 1999–2004 |
| 21st Century | |
| Christopher Ricks (1933– ) |
2004–9 |